Google receives 1.5m takedown requests weekly

The number of requests by rights holders to have content removed from Google has doubled in the last month. Under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA), copyright holders can force websites take down links which point to content infringing their rights.

But the number of takedown requests is getting higher. Google said that it is censoring more than 1.5 million URLs per week. This is double what it used too. Rights holders and anti-piracy bodies to remove 5.7 million URLs from its search results when this time last year, weekly URL takedown requests were at 131,577 – compared to the 1.5 million now received by the search engine. The report also showed that requests made by the British Government for access to Google users’ private data had increased by 25 per cent on the year.

In the second half of 2011, Google received 1,455 requests from the Government to hand over its users’ private data and it complied with 64 per cent of those demands. Requests from the US government at the end of last year also grew by 37 per cent, from 4,601 in 2010, to 5,950.

Google was much better at making the US happy and satisfied more than 94 percent of its requests. Which is odd because usually the British are much more polite. Still Google only fulfilled 45 per cent of the German government’s requests for data and did not help Russia or Turkey at all.